A Numerical Study of Optimization Methods for Phase-Only Optical Pulse-Shaping

The field of optical pulse-shaping and its applications is introduced, with a focus on time-domain approaches. A numerical investigation of all-fiber, time-domain, phase-only filtering is conducted for arbitrary temporal pulse synthesis. The theoretical phase modulation function required for generating use- specific target-intensity profiles is calculated using different optimization methods including a Brute Force Monte Carlo search, the Simulated Annealing method and the Genetic Algorithm method. The convergence speed, computational complexity and accuracy of these methods is compared under binary phase-only modulation, where the Genetic algorithm was found to outperform other methods.